Feature: Spain suffers brain drain as youth emigrate abroad to look for work

28-year-old Manuel M. He left Spain in 2012 to find a job in the Netherlands. He worked with short-term contracts or zero hour contracts in the lowland country.

"The boss can decide and vary the worker's working hours, usually from zero to full-time," he said to Xinhua in a recent interview.

"It was a hard but rewarding experience," he said. "I could get a little of the optimism towards the future young people living in these countries have. Compared to Spain, they have an unemployment rate of nearly 7 percent."

Manuel finished his BA in Political Science in 2009, a year after the bursting of the housing bubble that triggered the crisis. In his opinion, Spain "loses consumers from a younger generation, who could also provide new ideas to the economy, contributing to new changes in economic organizations, building a more dynamic economy and society".

He is not alone.

In Spain the unemployment rate among young people aged between 16 and 24 years old stood at 51.80 percent at the end of 2014, according to the Inquest into the Active Population (EPA) published by the National Institute of Statistics (INE).

High unemployment in Spain has pushed many youngsters to look for solutions outside the country, which contributed to the so-called brain drain phenomenon.

Although youth unemployment fell by 93,400 people in 2014, it still remains very high. "but the figures are encouraging and they will consolidate in 2015,"Jose Ramon Pin, director of the International Research Center on Organizations from the IESE Business School, said.

"There is a lot of work to do to reduce youth unemployment rate below 50 percent," he added.

"50,000 young Spaniards have emigrated over the last two years," Pin said, adding that especially skilled workers, who will stay in foreign countries or come back when the economy recovers.

Pin said that "a Spaniard living in a foreign country is a source of remittances and a cultural bridge" so emigrating "it is not necessarily a bad thing".

"Working with low salaries and temporary contracts is logical when you are very young," but he warned: "The problem could be that precarious employment becomes the norm".

Pin drew attention to the situation of those young and low skilled workers, who could end up being excluded from the labor market. "This will require programs aimed at reintegrating them," he said, adding that this group could represent around 10 percent or 15 percent of the youngsters as many young people have university degrees.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the unemployment rate of university students in Spain is 14 percent, as opposed to the average of 5 percent from other OECD countries.

Spain suffered a severe economic recession that led to very high unemployment figures, reaching 6.2 million unemployed in the first quarter of 2013. According to the INE, between July, 1, 2008 and July, 1, 2013 a total of 2,186,795 people left Spain.

However, countries like Britain and Germany registered a greater number of Spanish people than that provided by the INE, as many of them are not registered at consulates or they are still listed at the Spanish register of inhabitants.

The Spanish government said the situation will improve and described 2014 unemployment data as positive, but admitted that further work is required to reduce the figures. By 2015, the government expects a 22.9 percent unemployment rate. Enditem